What's next for you?

Sorry Rob for the problems you had. Life sometimes is not easy. Nice to see you back in RFF and back to photography. I'm sure you ll do interesting things. Keep on looking at the positive sides !
 
My afternoon stroll was OK, I really do need to sort out a strap for the Arax. And, while I was out I remembered that some where in a box in my attic, I have a 45mm lens (Mir 26b, I think?) for the Arax and I need to find it. Honestly not sure I made any good photos but I am positive that the time was well spent.

Rob
Calzone said:
Rob,

I'm glad you are back.

Cal
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Thank you!
 
Rob,

I just rounded up some medical examination furniture at work that basically is recycling. I have a wheeled computer stand, a doctor's stool, some dolly to store a blood pressure cuff, and chromed and wheeled medical hamper that has a foot opener.

Crazy how all this gear is still fresh.

They are demo'ing a site, and otherwise all this stuff would of gotten thrown out and end up in a landfill. There are all these cabinets that are horizontal files, and these other steel cabinets that would be great for a studio or workshop.

Anyways an administrator told me to help myself, and its okay to take this stuff home.

How crazy is this. It sickens me that all this good stuff is going to waste. Know that I grew up poor so this is painful.

Saturday I'm looking at a cape with a garage on an almost 1/4 acre. One thing hasn't changed is that I am a bit of a hoarder, but I have my gal moderating these tendencies.

Cal
 
kshapero said:
I'm culling my herd (see Classified for Nikon Film SLR's for sale). Trying to make my life more simple.
Click to expand...

I beg your pardon?! :D :D

I haven't really started but I need to do the same. I must admit I am not looking forward to it. Some will to my son-in-law and some to my grandson. The rest I guess I will sell or give away.
 
peterm1 said:
Or several barns (I have seen American Pickers on TV) :)
Click to expand...

Indeed. Several barns totally packed with stuff. It's sad because typically the owner or owner's wife will mention numerous items bought decades ago which became never-worked-on projects.

There have been times when I've thought of eliminating all the advanced-electronic cameras I've got (except the few I've bought new), keep just the all-mechanical or all-mechanical-plus-metered cameras, and sell some duplicates.
 
jsrockit said:
Joe, are you sure he can't do it?
Click to expand...


Joe and John,

My friend Steve said that I single-handedly downsized Grumman at the end of the Cold War. That was 500 acre industrial park.

In Long Island City I had all this aircraft parts. On my Jeep Scrambler with a Corvette engine and a cut down Ford 9 inch rear was mucho aircraft parts. Only the best for me. LOL. My motor mount bolts were Army/Navy (A/N) grade 8 bolts with castleated nuts and through holes for nickle safety wire. When I too my Jeep to get a safety inspectin all the mechanics would gather under the lift and point out all the hardware.

One mechanic turned to me and asked, "You must work at Grumman." LOL.

My friend Cris the arch top guitar builder was building a drag race car, so I hoarded lots of parts for him. Now Cris also owns some famous vintage Funny Car that has some historical value that held some track records back in the day.

So the home we saw Saturday in Beacon was mucho run down and displayed neglect everywhere, and on top of that it already was a bidding war for an overpriced home that really didn't inspire me.

So now "Maggie" asked me if I would consider Peekskill. "Is this my dream come true?"

Know that not only am I a skinny bitch, but also a biker bum who once lived to ride like a surfer lived to surf. Pretty much every day and likely the best part of my day.

Peekskill not only has some of the best air quality in the U.S., but also has Blue Mountain Preserve which one biker on Metro North wearing full body armor and had a tricked out full susspension mountain bike told me that Peekskill has some of the best technical singletrack in the northest.

Then just across the Bear Mountain Bridge on the other side of is Bear Mountain State Park and Harrimon State Park. This is where my road racing team would go to train (East End Cycling Team). These guys were animals. They were not well like in the Prospect Park races. Shinny bitches from Lawn Guy Land.

So now we want to view this 1912 Victorian Arts and Crafts, Craftsman house that is on the outskirts of town, kinda close to Indian Point, the nuclear power plant, that is just outside Blue Mountain Preserve. Dickey Brook connects a series of ponds and lakes is kinda fringing on my hopeful future property.

No barn, but a double car garage that is on the dead-end street that flanks my old 4 bedroom, two full bath Victorian. The house is funky in a Calzone kinda way. Mucho windows all over the place and all different sizes. The lot is perhaps only 40 feet wide, but over 200 feet long, so long that basically the dead end is a public driveway for my house and the other house on the opposite corner. How cool is that? If I really wanted to get crazy I could park about 20 cars. How hill-billy is that?

Know that out in the ritzy "Idle Hour" section of Oakdale that was formally part of a Vanderbuilt estate that at one time I owned 5 cars, and that saying is true: "You know you are a hill-billy when half the cars you own don't run."

Some of my cars my neighbors politely asked me not to park my car in front of their house. This was at a time I was "King of the $200.00 cars." I would buy these rats and keep them going for years. Of course I was a crazy driver.

The way back of the property is all woods and the buffer zone for the aformentioned Dickey Brook. Pretty much Woods Street can't be extended, I don't have to worry about future development, and the result is I only have one next door neighbor.

So If I go hill-billy and have a fleet of cars I have my public/private driveway where I could park easily a dozen cars, but also I have a detached two car garage.

The Victorian is a side hall style with stained glass, a Re-Pun-Sul tower, and windows that arch around, a double pocket door to isolate the dining room from the living room, and all the original raised panel doors.

So even though there are 4 bedrooms I feel like a homeless person, because Maggie wants the one with the windows that arch around as her study/office, the smallest bedroom as her "closet" for her clothes, and the extra bedroom as a guest room.

The good thing is that I have city sewer, and if I have a dry basement I likely could do "A Crazy Dan" and go wacky. The two car garage likely would get heated and I would build out a "Powermatc" woodworking shop. I think I need to frame my work.

The furnace is new, as well as the roof, and so are the windows. The walk to Metro North is 1.3 miles.

The back yard is level and it appears that it might have been a farm at one point.

So the kitchen is really odd and strange. No dishwasher? The sink, stove and fridge do not form the classic and convenient equal-lateral triangle of good design and function.

The ugly is a water stain on the dining room ceiling??? The 108 years of paint need to be stripped off the moldings (the hardwood floors are good). Though functional and not a disaster, the kitchen is kinda crazy. The layout seems restricted and dictated by all the windows.

So for a biker dude this is like having a beach bungalow on the North Shore of Haa-Y-EE if I were a surfer.

I figure 4 years of commuting, and the train ride is only an hour. Even though this is Westchester and taxes are kinda crazy there, Peekskill has that post industrial collapse, and a bit of ghetto in the suburbs feel, not the best schools, and perhaps some ghetto feel to keep the taxes reasonable at least in the "historic" of funky homes that have "Calzone" factor.

I will likely leave work one of these days early to view this funky house with odd property that pretty much is about as socially distant can be in the suburbs, yet within walking distance to the train.

Am I like Homer Simpson because I live close to a nuclear power plant?

Anyways Saturday's waste of time an failure taught me a lot. I really want this strange house. I have the possibility of doing a "Crazy Dan." Dan is also known as "Devil Dan" because he is a clever devil like Christian, who was the first to get the "Devil" pre-fix. I thought it funny "Devil Christian for short instead of the compliment a clever devil.

Cal
 
Calzone said:
The ugly is a water stain on the dining room ceiling???
Cal
Click to expand...

Sounds like either an upstairs bathroom soil pipe or drain pipe joint was/is leaking. Or there is a leak in the roof somewhere and it is crawling down a joist between interior walls and pooling in your ceiling. If you have plaster for the ceiling, good luck. If it is sheetrock, that's a lot easier to fix. Be careful, you may find a veritable Narnia of mold just beyond that first layer of paper. If you have mold anywhere in the house, consider it at least $20,000 of remediation to add to your mortgage. Maybe you could have them pry away at it to see if there is mold there. My parents had black mold in their kitchen in New Mexico, due to a leaking dishwasher. It cost them $11,000 for mold remediation, so they refinanced the mortgage and extended it out $20,000 to completely remodel the kitchen. That's New Mexico, where mold is almost unheard of.
I would run away from Queen Elizabeth's Sandrignham Castle even if it were offered to me for a few dollars, if I saw extensive black mold.

Phil Forrest
 
Also see post 105, where basically if I wanted to be greedy I could take part of a NYC hospital home with me. I know I will have remorse over the steel cabinets I didn't take. A really nice modular size.

"Don't tell Magge."

At home I already have two doctor's stools so I have the third stashed at work.

From mucho labs I basically already have a triple beam balance and a complete set of brass calibrated weights, a stash of brown gallon jugs that one had research grade alcohols in them, all this expensive glassware, ultrasonic tank, magnetic hot plate...

So I already have a chemical lab in storage.

"Don't tell Maggie."

Also don't remind Maggie about all the guitars, amps, and bass'es I have stored at two friend's homes out on Long Island.

My hoarding is a mark of poverty, even though I am no longer poor.

Funny thing is in storage I have two gallons of this heavy commercial two part epoxy paint that the painter's who were painting my Cyclotron lab floor offered me, perhaps only because I have a pony tail if that makes any sense.

I found a Contax T3 in Williamsburg by avoiding stepping on it. It was in a black case and I thought it was a dog turd left by a hipster who lived on the north side. I lived on the southside, and basically the hipsters all walked their dogs and left booby traps for the southsiders.

Found a Leitz tripod on Broadway near the old Leica Gallery. Recently found a Manfroto light stand on Third Avenue not far from where I live.

At Grumman I was on a field assignment at Los Alamos for over a year and a half. I came back to Bethpage Long Island and this engineer asked me if by chance if I knew where these specially order power supplies were, and he mentioned that he spent the past three days looking for them.

He was really annoyed when I walked to a cabinet, opened the door, pulled out a box, and then removed another box that had the power supplies he could not find.

Then he mention that they could not find anything while I was gone.

Anyways this is what I'm know for: annoying people; why do they love me? LOL.

Cal
 
Phil_F_NM said:
Sounds like either an upstairs bathroom soil pipe or drain pipe joint was/is leaking. Or there is a leak in the roof somewhere and it is crawling down a joist between interior walls and pooling in your ceiling. If you have plaster for the ceiling, good luck. If it is sheetrock, that's a lot easier to fix. Be careful, you may find a veritable Narnia of mold just beyond that first layer of paper. If you have mold anywhere in the house, consider it at least $20,000 of remediation to add to your mortgage. Maybe you could have them pry away at it to see if there is mold there. My parents had black mold in their kitchen in New Mexico, due to a leaking dishwasher. It cost them $11,000 for mold remediation, so they refinanced the mortgage and extended it out $20,000 to completely remodel the kitchen. That's New Mexico, where mold is almost unheard of.
I would run away from Queen Elizabeth's Sandrignham Castle even if it were offered to me for a few dollars, if I saw extensive black mold.

Phil Forrest
Click to expand...

Phil,

There are mucho nice original details. The house has great potential and the geography is very private. That creek has a rather large buffer zone of woods.

I assume the roof got replaced for a reason. I have done tear downs and replaced roofs, but a Victorian has complicated roof lines and is not so straight forward as a cape or ranch. The water stain I saw was the size of a dinner dish perhaps, but that only starts the narritive that lays underneath.

Also the house is over a hundred years old, so anything is possible or even probable. While so many details and original features remain well preserved, some of the ceilings are dropped. I surely will want to know why.

My dead end driveway that runs perhaps 150 feet is shared with the other corner house. The border on the woods buffer for Dickey Brook, and the possibility of having a two car garage workshop/woodworking studio is valuable to me.

If the full basement (Bilco door) is a dry basement, then pretty much another case of divine intervention. Maggie can have the 4 bedrooms, but I will have my studio/darkroom, and workspace.

I can see me doing lots of crazy stuff over the next 40 years. BTW because I don't drink, don't smoke, my diet, my physical fitness, my low BMI, my education, my accumulated wealth... family medical history, I have an extend lifespan way past 83 (78 age for average U.S. male plus 5 years for being highly educated) of 106.

My current biological age is 39, even though I'm 62 1/2.

There is some concrete slab I will have to break up. A friend I had in New Mexico was in the minor leagues as a pitcher. We had enough New Yorkers working at Los Alamos that basically we had a New York softball team. Ron mentioned for training he would swing a sledge for a couple of hours to build strength.

I used a maul to quarter cords of wood. They called me Cal Ripkin because on any pitch I would hit a line drive over 2d base. Ron though could make a softball fiizzle cutting through the air. It was kinda like a rail gun. I knew because I was the catcher and was terrified when Ron threw the ball home for me to tag a base runner.

Once Ron who played short stop rail gunned the ball to first base to beat a runner. His boss manned first base, but the ball had so much velocity that tit tore the mitt of his boss, the first baseman, and then the mit an ball continued on a journey into Ron's boss's groin. It had laser precision, a shot to the chops, but the gut reflex of grabbing his balls also capture the mitt with the ball inside.

The runner was declared out by the umpire. Everyone but the first baseman was laughing.

Cal
 
All this talk of old age can be disheartening. Let me offer two quotes.
Robert Louis Stevenson "to travel hopefully is better than to arrive"
Bette Davies "old age ain't for softies"
L passed 85 earlier this year, have some arthritis problems but I can still plan to visit places and things even though in all honesty I know I probably will not go or do these things but the joy of these plans is that they provide a distraction from reality!!
Old age may not be fun but it sure as hell beats the alternative
Mike
 
mad mike said:
All this talk of old age can be disheartening. Let me offer two quotes.
Robert Louis Stevenson "to travel hopefully is better than to arrive"
Bette Davies "old age ain't for softies"
L passed 85 earlier this year, have some arthritis problems but I can still plan to visit places and things even though in all honesty I know I probably will not go or do these things but the joy of these plans is that they provide a distraction from reality!!
Old age may not be fun but it sure as hell beats the alternative
Mike
Click to expand...

Way to go Mike

Mike
 
Phil_F_NM said:
.
I would run away from Queen Elizabeth's Sandrignham Castle even if it were offered to me for a few dollars, if I saw extensive black mold.

Phil Forrest
Click to expand...

Sandringham is is clear of black mould . :)

50287983912_507b4a57cd_c.jpg
 
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